The Central Points

Despite great gains in the past decade, the American Negro is still often denied the most basic right of citizenship under constitutional government —the right to vote.

Last week the Negro's struggle to achieve that right exploded into an orgy of police brutality, of clubs and whips and tear gas, of murder, of protests and parades and sit-ins in scores of U.S. cities and in the White House itself. It was a week in which the potential for further violence was so great that President Johnson signed an order that would have dispatched federal troops to Alabama on a moment's...